Pet Peeve of the day: Dumb female leads in horror movies

Watching a re-run of Stepfather II (I’m a sucker for late-night horror fests!), I can’t help but use my new detective school skills to analyze the female characters. Would I have seen the signs BEFORE agreeing to marry a serial killer? I think so, because the red flags were pretty obvious.

1) They get engaged within weeks of meeting, and within days of her ex-husband mysteriously disappearing (and her new man was the last one to see him alive!)

2) He has no friends or family…and she never asks him about it. Of course her one smart and well-meaning girlfriend, who points this out, asking questions like “How well do you really know Gene?” and “None of his friends or family are coming to the wedding?” is dismissed as jealous.

3) When the one smart female character DOES figure out that the man her friend is marrying could be a deranged psycho, does she go to the cops? No! She heads home, gets drunk, passes on the couch and waits to be killed.

I know, I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the poor single mother who almost got hacked up by a serial killer, but really, couldn’t she have used a few brain cells and done a simple background check? Even in the pre-Internet era, a few phone calls would have saved her a lot of heartache–and therapy bills, after her kid comes to terms with the fact that he had to beat a man to death with a hammer.